“The Urbanization of the Human Population”

This chapter provides a picture of leading cities in global city network for early years of twenty-first century. Peter J.Taylor begins Global City Network with a review of how a number of scholars laid theoretical groundwork for global city research. He says that global cities are existing commercial cities that grew bigger and more powerful during late twentieth century and also a new phenomenon entirely, different in kind and different in function than anything that had come before. Global cities are sites of a certain kind of service-economy activity, interconnected in a network, said as external relations of global cities. London and New York are the highest ranking cities in terms of Global Network Connectivity. Cities grow through trading with each other. The link to contemporary globalization comes from insistence on treating the external relations of cities, which are inter-city networks. Globalization is a highly contested concept that implies an enhanced scale of human activities that have a worldwide reach.